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The big wins are in niches that involve a lot of domain-specific knowledge. The two best examples that I was personally involved with were the NASA Deep Space
by lisper 3y ago
The big wins are in niches that involve a lot of domain-specific knowledge. The two best examples that I was personally involved with were the NASA Deep Space One Remote Agent and the Meta chip design tool from Barefoot Networks (acquired by Intel in 2019). In the former case, an attempt was made to do the implementation in C++, which failed outright. In the latter case you can do a pretty direct apples-to-apples comparison of the design cycle time relative to off-the-shelf design tools. Meta lets you iterate in minutes what would take hours using standard tools. (To be fair, Meta does not do everything that the standard tools do, and before you can tape-out you have to do a few iterations on standard place-and-route and timing verification. But it's still a huge win over just using those for the entire design.)
- FreakLegion 3y agoI have experience with EUROPA, which has gone on to have a long life independent of RAX (e.g. I believe it's still used via SACE for the ISS solar arrays). EUROPA is C++, not Lisp, even though Lisp isn't an unusual choice in AI planning.
- lisper 3y ago> EUROPA is C++, Maybe it is now (I don't know -- I've been out of that field for over 20 years) but it wasn't then.
- FreakLegion 3y agoI don't doubt that RAX used Lisp, but they replaced it with C++ within a few years, somewhere between HSTS and the second generation of EUROPA. The C++ versions are the ones that have been in 'production', so to speak, for a couple decades now. The early 2000s Mars Exploration Rovers might've been on an old enough version to still be running Lisp, though.